In this home on ice

Snow builds up outside our door alarmingly fast. When any way untidy, our Portobello basement flat looks a lot like a storage cupboard, the kind where you keep all your old coats and where the cat goes to shit (though that may just be in my family). But she found a way to make our two too-small rooms look like a home to be proud of. And every time I gaze at our bookshelves that feels like us. And every time we mistrust the rust on TV and stick on something better it feels good. A pot of tea feels like an event. I asked her to marry me here. We spent our wedding night here.

I don't get, more often than not, why she'd even want to live with me at all. When I tacked up fairy lights with electrical tape they fell down, probably minutes after I rushed out to the pub. It must have looked like someone had mugged Christmas when she got home, deserving far better than that. And me, bumbling home hours later, all "What? Sorry." Slinging my clothes everywhere but the shelves. Jesus, she'd have to love me.

She has the fairy lights sitting beautifully above the fireplace now, like I knew she would. Black ice permitting, we could be spending Christmas here, and that'd be fine. This place is big enough for the both of us, and my many varieties of cuddle attacks, but it couldn't take the strain of a puppy or a baby or a hamster or a goldfish and so we both know that it's an interim house, here to keep us warm and build on all the massiveness we have, until the next good thing.